An interview with Brendan Haggerty, chief technology officer of the customer experience management company at Clarabridge, about what to do with actionable big data.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): Does Clarabridge use data to drive its own decisions?
Haggerty: Clarabridge is a voice of the customer company and as such we strongly believe in gathering feedback from our customers. We survey and monitor their feedback through all channels including their interaction with our services team, our product and our educational materials. We drive our product roadmap and strategy from their feedback.
Additionally, because voice of the customer as a discipline is relatively new in the business world, we help our customers communicate directly with each other to share data, best practices and advice. Nothing pleases us more than when the head of customer feedback at a large financial institution helps the VP of customers at a retailer and so on.
TEP: I'm increasingly hearing that the original big data strategy of collecting every bit of data you can and then figuring out later how to make use of it is unworkable given the volume of data available today. Do you think that's true?
Haggerty: Now you're talking our language. Yes, that is absolutely what we believe. We use multi-channel listening. Here's the scenario. Let's say you're a big airline that flies intercontinental flights and a new ash cloud has just erupted. Your customers are going to call you to reschedule, they are going to reschedule on your website, they are going to tweet at you. But maybe it's the people tweeting who first warn you that your rescheduled flights are wreaking havoc on the travelers' schedule. You can use this leading indicator to get messages out to your entire reservations team on how to best handle and prioritize the scheduling. It's another tool in your arsenal and it helps you to be more customer-focused than ever before.
TEP: Data is only useful if it's actionable. How do you turn data into strategic information top executives can easily understand and use to make decisions?
Haggerty: That's right. Actionable means everyone from the CEO to the customer service rep can do something with the data. C-Level strategies should be driven only after understanding customer feedback in the aggregate. You don't want to listen to just one loud person, but rather the chorus.
Here's one example: The Clorox Company decided to remove real pine from Pine-Sol. This eco-friendly decision wasn't always greeted with positive feedback in social media. So Clorox used the data to understand that it was a rather small group of people who were vocalizing their preferences and Clorox worked directly with them to understand why. Turns out they just like the smell of Grandma's Pine-Sol. So Clorox gave them a solution. A personal touch to this made Clorox a better more customer focused company while sticking to eco-friendly initiatives.
Another important aspect to actionable data is distributing it widely while offering drill-able experience. When you present data in a chart, allow users to drill down to see the data that makes up that chart, then allow them to drill further into the actual feedback from the customers. We learned this by working directly with our earliest users who told us, "get me to the verbatim." When you do this you enable literally everyone in the organization to be empowered by the data.
TEP: What are the biggest mistakes you see organizations make when they try to enact a data-driven strategy?
Haggerty: It's not easy to find, understand and interpret all the data in your organization. Most people keep the data they do have in silos. So the customer care team learns about net promoter and doesnít share it with marketing. Marketing looks at social feedback and doesnít share it with product, and so on. The fact is everyone needs access. In this case, knowledge truly is power.
Read "Get the most out of big data."
Brendan brings over 15 years experience in managing, developing, and implementing enterprise applications. Prior to joining Clarabridge, Brendan was Cross Product Lead at SAP, where he was responsible for coordinating and managing product release activities.
